After the Flex Roadmap session I overheard some personal Q&A time between a developer and the speaker.  The developer indicated (and I made the association just as he said it) that this new style they were expirementing with is essentially what Microsoft is doing in WPF and Silverlight (WPF/E) is.  The speaker said it was definately similar.

The last time I looked at the Silverlight stuff I kept wondering where all the controls were.  The thing is, they already have the simple shapes that Flex is talking about.  You just draw in MS Expression and it generates XAML Graphics (part of what Thermo will do).

The developer brings up an interesting point, however, that the speaker seems to take to heart (they even exchange business cards over the discussion).  Basically, you can come at this component design from two angles. 

Angle 1 is designing several rolled up components and chosing to expose certain properties.
Angle 2 is the new design, making the view completely configurable/editable in a large hierarchical grouping of Graphics, marked up and editable in XML.

The drawback of Angle 1 is exactly what they were saying in the session, that they have to guess what the developers will want to mess with in order to expose them.  However, there is positive side to this approach, which is of course the weakness of Angle 2.  The weakness, as stated by this developer, is that often times people just want to do something simple, like change the rollover color of  a row in a list.  The XML markup of the view for a list is now so freakining huge and has XML attributes for color everywhere that it becomes a massive undertaking to find and tweak one or two little things.

In fact, this developer stated they actually come full circle and write some code in WPF to expose a few of the most commonly changed properties on the now super configurable view.

Interesting stuff.  Hopefully the Flex team comes up with a good solution.